A live, public activation dataset: what happens between a trader signing up on an exchange, making a first deposit, and placing a first trade — measured continuously across Bybit, OKX and Bitget via affiliate APIs.
No crypto exchange publishes its activation funnel. When we researched the question "how long after depositing does a trader place their first trade?", we found no hard public benchmark anywhere — the closest proxies are financial-services product benchmarks (Amplitude's cross-industry dataset found the first ~7 days to be the decisive activation window, with 69% of strong early-activation products also retaining at 3 months) and academic work showing crypto trading activity moves with sentiment (Bowden & Gemayel, 2022).
So we started measuring it ourselves and publishing the result. This page tracks a real cohort of referred traders from June 1, 2026 onward, updated automatically from exchange affiliate APIs. It is intentionally transparent about sample size — the numbers get more representative every month.
| Metric | Definition |
|---|---|
| Sign-up → deposit rate | Share of referred accounts that make any deposit |
| Deposit → first trade | Days between first detected deposit and first detected trading volume (live-detected events only; backfilled history excluded) |
| Funded-not-trading share | Deposited accounts with zero trading volume to date — the "parked capital" cohort |
| KYC completion | Share of referred accounts with passed identity verification (as reported by exchange APIs) |
| Maker share | Maker (limit-order) volume as a share of total tracked volume — where the split is reported |
| Blended effective fee rate | Total fees paid ÷ total volume across the cohort, all products combined |
1. Deposit ≠ activation. Half of funded accounts in the cohort haven't placed a trade yet. Capital parks. If the first ~7 days after funding are the decisive window (per the financial-services benchmark above), the gap between "deposited" and "trading" is where most referred value silently dies.
2. When traders do activate, it's fast. The measured deposit→first-trade events in this cohort happened in roughly a day — consistent with "fast or never" activation behavior seen in fintech.
3. Active traders are maker-heavy. Two-thirds of tracked volume is maker flow — real traders work limit orders, which also means their blended effective fee rate (0.045%) sits well below headline taker rates (0.050–0.060%).
These are observations from a small, disclosed cohort — not universal claims. As n grows, this section gets richer.
Data is pulled from Bybit, OKX and Bitget affiliate APIs every 8 hours (UTC), stored per account per day, and aggregated here. Cohort = accounts referred via Rebatly from June 1, 2026. Event timestamps are detection times (≤8h granularity); exchange-side reporting lags roughly a day. No personal data is collected or published — only aggregate behavioral metrics. Raw aggregates: stats.json.
Source: Rebatly Crypto Trader Activation Tracker — https://rebatly.io/research/crypto-trader-activation/